Can China's carbon intensity constraint policies improve carbon emission performance? Evidence from regional carbon emissions.

Carbon Intensity Constraint Policies (CICPs) are vital for addressing climate change challenges and advancing sustainable development. Since 2010, China has rolled out three five-year CICPs. However, there is limited understanding of their impact on carbon emission performance (CEP). Addressing this, this study pioneers the exploration of the CICP's impact on China's CEP. Drawing from government intervention and green paradox theories, this study highlights a concerning scenario: local governments achieve emission targets via excessive intervention. For deeper insights, this study melds the overall technology frontier concept with a non-radial, non-angle directional distance function, introducing a novel efficiency model rooted in the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. This offers a CEP measure across 30 Chinese provincial regions from 2002 to 2019. Using the quasi-difference-in-differences (quasi-DID) and moderated mediation models, this study ascertains the presence of the green paradox, uncovers its reasons, and suggests mitigation strategies. The results indicate that high government intervention diminishes CEP. This negative effect intensifies under greater regional fiscal pressure. Alarmingly, local authorities' eagerness to meet targets shows a counterproductive, inverted N-shaped trend regarding CICPs' time-based influence on regional CEP. Moreover, the impact varies based on regional economic development levels and stages. This study has ensured the robustness of the findings via parallel trend tests, parallel exclusion policies, a strengthened quasi-DID framework, and diverse control variable configurations. This study underscores the need for more balanced government intervention. It offers valuable policy insights, guiding China's upcoming CICP phase to realize the ambition of peaking carbon by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.

Can environmental information disclosure spur corporate green innovation?

How can the disclosure of environmental information (EID) stimulate corporate green innovation (CGI)? This research challenges the prevailing assumption that environmental regulations impact CGI by influencing corporate compliance costs. Instead, it offers a fresh theoretical framework to explain how EID affects CGI. This study combines signal theory and resource dependence theory to develop a moderated mediation model, illustrating how EID reduces information asymmetry and alleviates corporate financial constraints (CFC). To test these hypotheses, this study utilized data from A-share listed companies spanning the period 2004 to 2017. This study considered the year 2009 as a crucial point of analysis, marking the period before and after the implementation of China's first EID policy in 2008. This study employed a Difference-in-Differences (DID) model. The results reveal that EID has a positive impact on CGI by mitigating CFC, with non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) exhibiting a more pronounced mediating effect. These findings remain robust even when the parallel trend assumption was tested to eliminate interference from other factors. This study unveils the mechanism through which voluntary environmental regulation, represented by EID, influences CGI by mitigating information asymmetry and alleviating CFC. These results deviate from the predictions of compliance cost theory and Porter's hypothesis regarding the impact of traditional environmental regulations on CGI, providing a fresh perspective on the role of voluntary environmental regulation in driving CGI.

Assessment on the interaction between technology innovation and eco-environmental systems in China.

To investigate the latent relation between technology innovation and eco-environmental systems and promote their coordinated development, we integrated the coupling coordination model and panel vector autoregressive model to examine the evidence from China. The research reveals that the technology innovation benefit and eco-environmental governance and endowment are the prominent factors for optimizing the two systems. Moreover, the findings show that the coupling coordination degree of eco-environment and technology innovation in China presents an upward trend. In terms of the dynamic interaction between technology innovation and eco-environment, the influence of the former on the latter is timely while that of the latter on the former is lagging (except for the central region). The weak coupling coordination degree implies that the mutual promotion of technology innovation and eco-environmental systems has not yet formed. The policy implications are proposed accordingly to promote coordinated development of eco-environment and technology innovation in China.

Emotional Responses to Visual Art and Commercial Stimuli: Implications for Creativity and Aesthetics.

There is an ongoing debate about whether emotional responses to artworks are similar to those produced by the commercial stimuli experienced in everyday life. In this study, we evaluated the emotional responses to the visual art and commercial stimuli by using electroencephalography (EEG) to obtain an objective measure of emotional responses of the brain, namely the frontal alpha asymmetry. Positive frontal alpha asymmetry suggests positive emotional responses, and vice versa. The visual art stimuli consisted of 80 artistic and naturally colored paintings whereas the commercial stimuli consisted of 80 different window displays of fashion collections. The results revealed that positive frontal alpha asymmetry was elicited when the participants judged the visual art stimuli as either beautiful or not beautiful. For the commercial stimuli, positive frontal alpha asymmetry was observed when they were considered as beautiful, whereas negative frontal alpha asymmetry was exhibited toward those perceived as not beautiful. These findings suggest more positive emotional responses to the visual art stimuli, regardless of their aesthetics. However, favorable emotional responses were only elicited toward the commercial stimuli regarded as beautiful. The implications for the creative and aesthetic design of the commercial stimuli in Chinese society in influencing consumers' emotional responses are discussed.

Music training is associated with cortical synchronization reflected in EEG coherence during verbal memory encoding.

Music training can improve cognitive functions. Previous studies have shown that children and adults with music training demonstrate better verbal learning and memory performance than those without such training. Although prior studies have shown an association between music training and changes in the structural and functional organization of the brain, there is no concrete evidence of the underlying neural correlates of the verbal memory encoding phase involved in such enhanced memory performance. Therefore, we carried out an electroencephalography (EEG) study to investigate how music training was associated with brain activity during the verbal memory encoding phase. Sixty participants were recruited, 30 of whom had received music training for at least one year (the MT group) and 30 of whom had never received music training (the NMT group). The participants in the two groups were matched for age, education, gender distribution, and cognitive capability. Their verbal and visual memory functions were assessed using standardized neuropsychological tests and EEG was used to record their brain activity during the verbal memory encoding phase. Consistent with previous studies, the MT group demonstrated better verbal memory than the NMT group during both the learning and the delayed recall trials in the paper-and-pencil tests. The MT group also exhibited greater learning capacity during the learning trials. Compared with the NMT group, the MT group showed an increase in long-range left and right intrahemispheric EEG coherence in the theta frequency band during the verbal memory encoding phase. In addition, their event-related left intrahemispheric theta coherence was positively associated with subsequent verbal memory performance as measured by discrimination scores. These results suggest that music training may modulate the cortical synchronization of the neural networks involved in verbal memory formation.

The latent causal chain of industrial water pollution in China.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the latent causal chain of industrial water pollution in China and find ways to cure the want on discharge of toxic waste from industries. It draws evidences from the past pollution incidents in China. Through further digging the back interests and relations by analyzing representative cases, extended theory about loophole derivations and causal chain effect is drawn. This theoretical breakthrough reflects deeper causality. Institutional defect instead of human error is confirmed as the deeper reason of frequent outbreaks of water pollution incidents in China. Ways for collaborative environmental governance are proposed. This paper contributes to a better understanding about the deep inducements of industrial water pollution in China, and, is meaningful for ensuring future prevention and mitigation of environmental pollution. It illuminates multiple dimensions for collaborative environmental governance to cure the stubborn problem.